


it's quiet now, the universe is standing still

by Alexander_Slamilton



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Force Ghost(s), Multi, Rey Kenobi, Rey Needs A Hug, might add more later - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22121476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alexander_Slamilton/pseuds/Alexander_Slamilton
Summary: Rey is a Kenobi. Force ghosts are there. I am tired. Please let me live.
Relationships: Poe Dameron & Finn & Rey, Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey
Comments: 1
Kudos: 32





	it's quiet now, the universe is standing still

The ground beneath her is gritty, hard, and cold. A trickle of blood rolls down her cheek and into her hair; it’s warm, tacky, and smells like iron. Whatever is above her is empty and dark; it hangs there with cold indifference to the fact that the air is slowly leaving her lungs. She feels nothing, she can barely remember her own name, or how she came to be lying broken on the floor. Everything hurts. From the tips of her fingers to the ends of her toes, everything burns. Drawing air into her lungs is becoming increasingly difficult. This is not the peaceful death she had imagined for herself, this is not the death anyone would imagine for themself. Her hands scrabble around on the loose earth, feeling the pricks of sharp rocks beneath her fingers, she’s looking for something. Something that isn’t there. She heaves another breath. Another breath. 

“Be with me.” She pleads, she’s begging. No one is with her. 

“Be with me.” This time, she realises it’s an order.

“Be with me.” She gasps, using the last of her strength. 

“Rey,” the word is whispered. Maybe in awe. Maybe it’s just not reaching her ears (which are likely filled with blood) correctly. But the word is there. She hears it. She feels it in her bones. “These are your final steps, rise, and take them.” A shadow. One she knows she’s not imagining, flickers to life at the corner of her vision. “We have always been with you.” A man with kind eyes, a well-worn face, he stands beside her. 

She. Rey. She is Rey. She is the Jedi. She is the force. 

“You are one with the force, and the force is with you.” Another shadow. Another man, his eyes are empty but they see more than anyone could ever wish to see. 

“Rey.” More shadows. 

“Rey.” This time the voice is softer, kinder but filled with fire. 

“Rey.” The shadows start to glow. She’s not sure if this is the end or the beginning. But she knows she is one with the force, with these shadows. She feels their power in her, burning away the pain, cradling her in the force. 

“Bring back the balance, Rey, as I did,” two shadows stand out amongst the rest, one the man with the kind eyes, the other next to him with a face that is not so different from Master Luke’s. 

“The light, find the light, Rey,” she finds it. Or it finds her. She’s doesn’t know. But it fills her buoys her. 

“Every Jedi who ever lived, lives in you,” and they do, she can feel them, she is sure she can see them standing with her. She looks to them and they look back at her, fully formed gifted to her by the force. 

“The force surrounds you, Rey,” it does, she feels it. She knows it. She is one with it. It is her’s and she is it’s. 

“Let it guide you.”

“Feel the force flowing through you, Rey.”

“Let it lift you.” She feels as though she is flying. Soaring. 

“Rise, Rey.” She is. She is. Never mind the pain. Never mind the blood. The force is with her, it flows through her with warm peace. Serenity.

“We stand behind you Rey,” she sees them, they are there. She knows them. She is one with them. 

“Rey.” The man with the kind eyes stands forward from the rest of them, holding out his hand. It is solid in hers. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. She knows. She knows. 

“Rise in the force, Rey,” she is rising. 

“In the heart of the Jedi lies their strength,” the words whisper through her, around her, she knows them to be true. 

“Rise.” The man says helping her stand, filling her with strength. 

“Rise.” She sees this Jedi’s face, sees how he looks at the man helping her with a father-like smile. 

“Rey. The force will be with you, always,” Master Luke. She looks to him, sees him standing with the rest. They are with her. They are her. She is them. She is one with the force. She is the Jedi. 

She wins. She dies. She lives. She… she… She dies. She lives. Ben dies. The force is with her. The Jedi are with her. She can feel them. All of them. She supposes she is not really Rey anymore. She, herself goes deeper than that. Every living thing, connected through the force, through luminous strands of light. She cannot just be, Rey, not after everything that’s happened to her. There is one thing that the force tells her, one thing that she is certain about in all the uncertainty around her. She is not Rey Palpatine. She is not Rey Skywalker. She is someone else. 

“You are someone else.” She’s still on Exogol, she’s sitting on a rock; it’s cold now that the heat and rush of battle has passed. The force ghost, the man with the kind eyes is the only one left showing himself. He walks towards her. Sits next to her on the rock. He sighs. 

“I wanted, in my time, to be the perfect Jedi. I wanted my career to be spent doing good. There was, one night, where I stopped thinking about it. I let myself feel. And it brought about the best thing I had ever had. I told no one. Save for my old Master.” He looks at her. He has her nose, she thinks, and maybe there is some of him in the shape of her face. “Well. The rock he gave me when I was a child. I held my child only once. Before I let him go. To my brother, on my home-world where it was safe, where nothing would ever trouble him. Except it was not like that after… after everything. But by the time I was able to do something about it, my brother and my son were in hiding. Gone, like ashes in the wind. I had lost the only thing left in the whole galaxy that meant anything to me. I felt my whole family, the beings I had loved, die. They screamed in the force. And I heard them. But I didn’t hear my son or my brother. I had faith the force would save them. And it did. Because you are proof it did.”  
“I am?” Rey looks at him. 

“You are. Because you are not Rey Palpatine, you are not Rey Skywalker, though I am sure Anakin would be happy to call you his own. You aren’t either of theirs. You are Rey Kenobi. My granddaughter.”

“Kenobi,” the name tastes right on her tongue. The force sings like something has come home. She supposes something has. 

“Yes,” the Jedi turns to her. “I am Obi-Wan Kenobi.” 

“Obi-Wan,” she says. 

“That’s right,” he nods. His force ghost is young, he’s got short hair that looks like it was red and eyes that shimmer blue. He’s bearded and he exudes a warm sort of peace that Rey wants nothing more than to bundle herself up in. 

“You look so young,” she says. 

“When we pass through to the force, we go back to when we were most at peace if we choose,” he explains. “I returned here. To the night I held my son for the first time.” 

“What was he called? My father? What was his name?” Rey asks. 

“Ben. I called him Ben. A name I took myself when I retreated to the deserts of Tatooine, a name that Leia then gave to her son.” He hasn’t stopped smiling. 

“Oh,” she says, she doesn’t think she’s smiled this much since she had last been with her boys, she misses them, like she would a limb or her heart. 

“The code.” Obi-Wan, her grandfather says, “the code forbid Jedi to have romantic relationships, before I broke it, I followed it to the letter. It was a ridiculous rule. Many Jedi broke it.”

“Right,” Rey nods. “That is a silly rule.”

“I will be with you, always,” Obi-Wan cups her cheek. He taps her chest with one ghostly finger, “look here whenever you need me and I will guide you. All of us will. Look to your heart, Rey. And bring balance to the force.” 

“This is all so much,” she wants to cry, to sob and fall to the ground; make the rocks swallow her whole and bury her in their embrace. 

“It is. And it’s unfair that we’re making you shoulder the burden of fixing our mistakes. We, the Jedi, did so much good. But also we did so much damage. We were rigid, we made the force flow for us, instead of letting us flow through it. We were unbending, so fixated on sticking to the light that we failed entirely. And now, we ask so much of you, it’s not fair. But, we are here, and you have your family around you.” He says, reaching out as if to cradle her, to wrap her in his ghostly arms. “There’s nothing I can say.” 

“It is done?” Rey looks to him. She sees him close his eyes, his head leaning back into the dark, letting the shadows swallow his face. 

“I don’t think it ever will be,” he sighs. It’s bone-deep. The sigh of someone who was broken in life and is broken in death. “They came back in my time, when the Sith hadn’t been heard of in years. They came back and they took my Master from me.” 

“They took mine from me too,” Rey nods, she sees the loss in him, knows it scars his soul. Even when united in the force, the loss of a bond is… hollowing. 

He makes a noise, somewhere between a snort and a groan, a translucent hand runs through translucent hair ruffling it. 

“The boy,” he says, “the boy you travel with. The one who once had a number instead of a name.”

“Finn?” Rey asks, wondering how a subject can change so abruptly, but not minding it in the slightest. Obi-Wan, her grandfather, is easy with his words, with the way he speaks. 

“He has it, he has the force,” Obi-Wan nods. “When the Jedi were still around, when we were strong, we would have asked to train him. I sensed him here, tonight. We all did.”

“You were with him?” Rey looks at him, noting the slight lines around his eyes, the crow's feet from smiling. All his happy moments etched on to his skin. 

“Always,” he nods, tucking his hands into his robes. 

“I have to go back,” Rey looks up at the hole in the ceiling of the cavernous arena, she watches as the mists surrounding Exegol shift and move, the last few remnants of the fleet floating almost peacefully down to the planet’s surface. The dark has been lifted here, and it feels visceral, real in its absence, the planet; perhaps the whole galaxy is allowed to breathe. To heave in a great sight of… peace. 

“I think so,” Obi-Wan says. 

“You’ll be with me?” She asks, not ready to let go of her family just yet. She wants a few more moments of having him in front of her, she’s earned this, she thinks. Maybe she’s being selfish, but after dying in pursuit of balance she thinks she might be owed this by the great cosmic scale that determines whatever. 

“Of course. Always. Forever. You are one with us, all of us.” 

“Alright, then.” She steels herself and stands on slightly unsteady feet. Obi-Wan is fading back into a shadow but she feels him behind her. 

“Goodnight, travel well,” he whispers, it echos around her, bouncing off the walls and rocks. It chases away the last remnants of Sith from her path. As though it were lifting up a curtain. 

She does, she does travel well. The journey back feels like her entire body is on auto-pilot, like she herself was a droid. Or maybe, someone is flying for her. She can’t be sure anymore. There are so many voices around her, she has never felt more connected. Rey sees the galaxy spread out before her, all interconnected lights glistening in the force; more of them than the stars, more of them than the planets, and moons and suns. Tiny twinkling lights, shimmering in the empty, each of them a living thing. Tears trickle down her face as she absorbs it. She can rest, as soon as she gets back to Finn, and Poe. Her boys. How she’s missed them, she smiles and leans back in the seat.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on tumblr if you want: @obi-wan-kxnxbi


End file.
